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Air pollution responsible for more than 2 million deaths worldwide each year, experts estimate


sciencedaily.com
Fri, 12 Jul 2013 13:08 UTC
More than two million deaths occur worldwide each year as a direct result of human-caused outdoor air pollution, a new study has found.
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© Korobanova Marina / FotoliaSmog hangs over Shanghai. Researchers estimate that worldwide, more than two million deaths occur each year as a direct result of human-caused outdoor air pollution.

In addition, while it has been suggested that a changing climate can exacerbate the effects of air pollution and increase death rates, the study shows that this has a minimal effect and only accounts for a small proportion of current deaths related to air pollution.

The study, which has been published today, 12 July, in IOP Publishing's journal Environmental Research Letters, estimates that around 470,000 people die each year because of human-caused increases in ozone.

It also estimates that around 2.1 million deaths are caused each year by human-caused increases in fine particulate matter (PM2.5) ? tiny particles suspended in the air that can penetrate deep into the lungs, causing cancer and other respiratory disease.
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Smoking

People power! Anti-smoking police hired by Scottish hospitals ignored by smokers

Lindsey Archibald
Daily Record, UK
Tue, 02 Jul 2013 06:11 UTC
All three wardens walked away from the job at Gartnavel Hospital in Glasgow in just one week after being intimidated and verbally abused by smokers outside the building.

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© Tom RossWardens James and Gordon were both targeted
Three wardens hired to stop people smoking outside hospitals have quit in disgust over the levels of verbal abuse.

All three walked away just days after starting the £12,000-a-year job, blaming intimidation from smokers.

The wardens were hired as part of an NHS drive to stop people flouting no smoking rules outside hospitals.

It was hoped they would encourage people to stop lighting up as doctors have warned the fog of smoke at hospital
doors could harm the health of visitors and patients.

The three wardens began work last week at Gartnavel Hospital in Glasgow, which is also home to the Beatson West of Scotland Cancer Centre.

But they quit within days, citing unbearable intimidation and verbal abuse from people they caught smoking in the grounds. NHS Glasgow and Clyde rolled out the scheme at 11 hospitals, employing 17 full-time wardens.

The scheme has seen them rebrand hospital entrances with red warning signs and giant no smoking zones.

Comment: "Smoke from cigarettes can get into the hospital and harm patients."

Insanity!

Smoking is healthier than fascism. No wonder these anti-smoking police were run out of town!

Fewer and fewer people smoke, and fewer and fewer people are exposed to tobacco smoke, yet the hospitals continue to fill up with more and more sick people... coincidence?

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Smoking

Smoking: The black lung lie

Frank Davis
cfrankdavis.wordpress
Sun, 12 Aug 2012 00:00 UTC
A discussion of 'smokers' black lungs' started in the comments today. It's the widespread belief that smokers' lungs turn black. Rose pointed out that it all started with James I about four centuries ago. She also dug up some refutations:
"Dr. Duane Carr - Professor of Surgery at the University of Tennessee College of Medicine, said this: "Smoking does not discolor the lung."

Dr. Victor Buhler, Pathologist at St. Joseph Hospital in Kansas City: "I have examined thousands of lungs both grossly and microscopically. I cannot tell you from exmining a lung whether or not its former host had smoked."

Dr. Sheldon Sommers, Pathologist and Director of Laboratories at Lenox Hill Hospital, in New York: "...it is not possible grossly or microscopically, or in any other way known to me, to distinguish between the lung of a smoker or a nonsmoker. Blackening of lungs is from carbon particles, and smoking tobacco does not introduce carbon particles into the lung."

Comment: and more ..

'World No Tobacco Day'? Let's all light up!

Why 'No World Tobacco Day'? Smoking is good for memory and concentration

An immune system and thyroid upside for tobacco

Tobacco-derived compound prevents memory loss in Alzheimers disease mice
Health Benefits of Smoking Tobacco

Tobacco used as medicine

Using tobacco plants to fight cancer

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Smoking

Best of the Web: Why 'World No Tobacco Day'? Smoking is good for memory and concentration

David Derbyshire
Daily Mail, UK
Thu, 14 Aug 2008 06:04 UTC
Image
Smoking aids concentration and memory, something the Powers That Be would rather you didn't have.
Smoking can help boost memory and concentration, say scientists. The discovery offers hope of a nicotine pill that mimics these effects to treat Alzheimer's disease.

Experts are developing drugs that copy the active ingredients in tobacco that stimulate the brain without causing heart disease, cancer, stroke or addiction.

The move follows the discovery that nicotine can boost the intelligence and recall ability of animals in laboratory experiments.

The researchers, who present their latest findings at a brain conference today, hope that the new drugs, which will be available in five years, could have fewer side effects than existing medicines for dementia.

But they stress the new treatment would not be a cure for Alzheimer's disease. At best it will only give patients a few extra months of independent life.

Tobacco has long been known to have a stimulating effect on the brain. Victorian doctors recommended smoking as a means of sharpening the wits and boosting concentration.

Comment: Medical research in the hands of Big Pharma is generally a disaster, but the silver lining here is that they went from trying to prove that smoking kills to showing that it's so healthy, they want to make a pile of money from it.

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Smoking

SOTT Focus: Let's All Light Up!

Laura Knight-Jadczyk
Sott.net
Tue, 04 Sep 2007 01:56 UTC

Comment: 'World No Tobacco Day', first 'celebrated' by the World Health Organization in 1987 is "intended to encourage a 24-hour period of abstinence from all forms of tobacco consumption across the globe." (Wiki)

Presumably because tobacco smoking is bad for you.

But is it really?

Certainly, it is not for everyone. And yet, in the face of outlandish claims by 'health experts' since the second half of the 20th century, many enjoy smoking and have benefited from it.

So let's get the facts straight.

The alleged dangers of Environmental Tobacco Smoke (ETS) are entirely fictional.

Smoking does not cause lung cancer. There is even some anecdotal evidence that it protects against lung cancer.

Smoking can protect against neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, and it can reduce the psychiatric, cognitive, sensory, and physical effects of schizophrenia.

And the children? One study conducted in Sweden observed two generations of Swedish children and found that children of smokers had lower rates of allergic rhinitis, allergic asthma, eczema, and food allergies.

In fact, the health benefits of smoking tobacco appear to extend way beyond all that.

A search of the SOTT.net database brings up more evidence, evidence that is either misunderstood because most researchers begin from the inculcated belief that smoking is evil (how scientific!), or because it is simply ignored when it doesn't fit into their perception of the world.

When we connect the dots through medicine, science, history, psychology and sociology, the truth emerges plain as day: the all-out global propaganda campaign against tobacco is part of the same push for 'full-spectrum dominance' over humanity in all other spheres. The targets and victims of the fake 'War on Terror' are the same targets of the war against tobacco. We are expected to believe that our wonderful 'leaders' encourage us to eat poisonous GMO food yet are oh, so concerned about the alleged health effects from smoking? Give us a break!

And so, in the spirit of resistance against the psychopaths' war on humanity, liberty and true health... Let's All Light Up!


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Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's
Let's Talk...

As Joan Rivers was wont to say.

But really, let's have a nice chat about the fact that our whole planet seems to have descended into lunacy!

The other day I noticed an interesting article the SOTT editors picked up:

Brain cells work differently than previously thought: Nicotine helps to spark creativity

which tells us:
Increasingly, studies are beginning to show that complex information processing, and perhaps consciousness itself, may result from coordinated activity among many parts of the brain connected by bundles of long axons. Cognitive problems may occur when these areas don't communicate properly with each other. [...]

Using nicotine, they stimulated the axon to determine how it would affect a signal the brain cell sent to the cortex. Without applying nicotine, about 35 percent of the messages sent by the brain cell reached the cortex. But when nicotine was applied to the axon, the success rate nearly doubled to about 70 percent.
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Smoking

Big Pharma wants you to Quit Smoking

TheZAP
Smoking Out The Truth
Thu, 14 Apr 2011 09:55 UTC
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The "Charities" (arf arf) are prone to suggest that 153% of smokers urgently want to quit smoking, which they call an "addiction". Looney Luke Clancy was bouncing this particular ball in lavish surroundings in Europe this month, courtesy of his paymasters at Pfitzer. In the conference report, the 'Loon' admits to being on the Pharmaceutical payroll for his 'research' into replacement products, or nicotine patches to you and me. So, the message from that quarter is, if you are spending €8.00 a day on cigarettes, we will force you to buy patches instead, thus increasing my employers profits and lining my own pockets with more research money. For readers who may not be familiar with this particular Doctor, he is the Father of the Irish smoking ban, having been CEO of the terrorist organisation ASH at the time our feeble minded Minister for Health put pen to the law.

But, the big question is, is smoking an addiction, a dependence or a habit?
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Smoking

Nicotine can boost blood vessel growth

Alan Mozes
HealthDay Reporter
Fri, 15 Dec 2006 16:57 UTC
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Nicotine may not be all bad: A study found it stimulated new blood vessel growth in mice by actively signaling their bone marrow to release vessel-forming adult stem cells.

The finding might translate to the use someday of nicotine as a means of helping wound healing and other conditions where new blood vessel growth is key, experts say. It also gives insight into unwanted vessel growth, such as that which happens during tumor formation.

The findings don't mean doctors will ever recommend smoking, however.


Comment: That is because they remain ignorant of the following among others:

Nicotine - The Zombie Antidote
Let's All Light Up!
Pestilence, the Great Plague and the Tobacco Cure
Comets, plagues, tobacco and the origin of life on earth


"I don't want people to think that smoking is good for you," cautioned co-author Dr. John P. Cooke, a professor of medicine at Stanford University's School of Medicine in California. "Tobacco smoke contains 4,000 compounds, and nicotine is just one of them. And what we've discovered is that nicotine alone can cause blood vessel growth."

"Blood vessel growth is like fire," Cooke added. "It's neither good nor bad. So, certainly nicotine-associated blood vessel formation can cause problems, in the context of enhancing tumor growth, causing macular degeneration and blindness, or promoting coronary plaque. But, on the other hand, knowing that this phenomenon occurs, we can potentially manipulate it in a way that can be therapeutic -- such as to enhance insufficient wound healing where part of the problem is related to poor blood vessel growth."
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Smoking

Does cigarette smoking really cause heart disease?

Barry Groves PhD
Second Opinions
Mon, 14 Jan 2013 12:45 UTC
Smoking movies 2
© Getty ImagesGlamourising: Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's made cigarette holders stylish.
Introduction

I was looking YouTube and noticed in one of the comments that I was accused of advocating smoking as a "healthy food". It was nonsense, of course, but it set me wondering where the writer of the comment had got the idea from.

It turned out that it was from an article I have on this website about diesel smoke being worse than cigarette smoke, written by the late Dr Kitty Little in 1999.

Anyway, it got me looking at the evidence for and against smoking and heart disease again. And caused my to write the following article - because the issue is not as clear as it might appear.

The smoking debate

Smoking, particularly cigarette smoking, was first indicted as a cause of lung cancer in the 1950s. Subsequently, it was blamed for many other diseases including cardiovascular disease. But, while there are certainly many papers in the medical literature which attest to smoking as a causal factor in these diseases, there are also a worrying number which refute them.

In the history of heart disease, stopping smoking has been recommended consistently for over half a century, along with lowering cholesterol, dietary changes and exercise to prevent the disease; the four have gone together. Falling incidences of CHD in various countries during the middle of the last century are regarded as a result of national policies on reduction in smoking as well as dietare changes. However, graphs of the rise of heart disease in various age groups in the USA and its subsequent fall from 1900 to 1978, together with trends in smoking over the period, plotted by Stallones in 1980, showed a complete lack of evidence that they are linked.1
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Smoking

Mandatory 'smokers license' under consideration

Benjamin Fearnow
CBS DC
Thu, 15 Nov 2012 05:07 UTC
WASHINGTON DC - A public health proposal suggests that tobacco smokers should be required to apply and pay for a "smoker's license" in order to continue buying cigarettes.

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© Matt Cardy/Getty ImagesA recent public health proposal looks at the pros and cons of enforced “smoker’s licenses” to curb international tobacco use.
In this week's PLOS Medicine medical journal, two leading tobacco control advocates debate the merits of the smoker's license. Simon Chapman, a professor at the University of Sydney, proposes that users would have to apply and pay for a mandatory license in the form of a smartcard that would be shown when buying cigarettes.

Dr. Chapman wrote that it could discourage young people from picking up the habit.

In a controversial move, the smartcard would allow the government to limit how many cigarettes a smoker could buy. Professor Chapman suggests 50 per day averaged over two weeks to accommodate heavy smokers. The anti-smoking activist told the Daily Mail that the sale of tobacco is currently subject to trivial controls compared to other dangerous products that threaten both public and personal safety.

A 2009 study from the Pew Research Center found that for the period of January through June 2008, the share of current smokers in the American adult population was 20.8 percent. According to statistics on the PLOS journal's website, tobacco continues to kill millions of people around the world each year and usage is even increasing in some countries.
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Smoking

Nicotine Analog Shows Promise For Alzheimer's Treatment

John Gever
MedPage Today
Wed, 18 Jul 2012 08:54 UTC
Image
© Unknown
An investigational drug targeting nicotinic receptors not only preserved cognitive function in Alzheimer's disease patients for 6 months, it showed signs of increasing it, a researcher said here.

Patients taking the highest dose of EVP-6124, a selective partial agonist of alpha-7 nicotinic receptors, in the 24-week trial showed a mean increase of 1.6 points from baseline in the 13-item cognition part of the Alzheimer's Disease Assessment Scale (ADAS-Cog-13), said Dana Hilt, MD, of EnVivo Pharmaceuticals in Watertown, Mass., which is developing the product.

The mean change from baseline at week 24 in a placebo group was -0.4 points (P=0.0189), Hilt reported at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference.

Speaking at a press briefing held before his formal presentation, Hilt said the scale of this effect was substantially greater than has been seen with existing drugs that boost cognition without altering the underlying Alzheimer's disease pathology.
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